Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
After a short, unacknowledged absence, Book Notes is back!
Hi y’all!
I’m back! And I’m coming in swinging with a review of Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. Acker was an experimental writer from New York who wrote novels that were transgressive both in their form and in their subject matter (Blood and Guts is composed of straightforward narrative, poetry, illustrations, essays, fairytales, stage directions, and more; it’s also fairly pornographic and filled with sexual violence including incest, child sexual assault, abortions, rape, prostitution). For a less abrasive introduction to Acker, I recommend reading her interview with the Spice Girls, which I found surprisingly tender.
First, a brief summary: Blood and Guts in High School follows Janey Smith, who begins the novel at age ten, living in Mexico with her father, who she describes as her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” and who she is sleeping with. Her father dumps her for an older woman (“Sally, a twenty-one-year-old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him”) and Janey is forced to move to New York. These pages are often accompanied by pornographic illustrations.
In New York, she has an abortion, attends school, works in the service industry, briefly becomes involved in a youthful gang called The Scorpions. At some point, she writes, or dreams, or maybe lives, a terrifying fairytale involving a beaver and a monster, and the bear who won’t stop trying to break into their house. A “dream map” in minute detail interrupts this fairytale for several pages. Janey drops everything to live with a boyfriend—and is then kidnapped, imprisoned, and “taught how to be a whore.” While imprisoned, she writes at length: poetry, Farsi, a lengthy essay about The Scarlet Letter. Much of the novel, including this section, collages lines taken directly from various famous poems and novels. These lines aren’t noted in the text, so much as cannibalized by it. Janey falls in love with her jailer, the “Persian slave trader,” but he still kicks her out when she finds out that she has cancer. Through all of these sections, Janey considers and writes at length about bodily autonomy, desire, freedom and love.
Released, she makes her way to Tangier, where she has a brief affair with President Carter and befriends the writer Jean Genet, whom she travels with until she is imprisoned again. She is freed by revolutionaries in Alexandria who then kick her and Jean Genet out of the city. He tells her that he hates her. Then she dies.
Blood and Guts is a deceptively long two-hundred pages. Between the form and the content, I doubt many of my regular Book Notes readers will like this book. I’m not sure I even liked it—so of course, I had to write my longest review to date. Like Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, even though I may not have “liked” Blood and Guts, I found reading it intensely generative creatively. There are so many ideas in the work, many of which are contradictory, strange, and exciting and even infuriating.
If I found Blood and Guts hard to read, it’s been much harder for me to write about. Acker’s work is not “tasteful;” it’s excessive, extreme. Blood and Guts is about an outcast, a girl who loves the people who inflict terrible violence upon her, a girl who is ugly and a monster and wonderfully wild. The reader is repeatedly forced into a contradictory position—sometimes one of empathy, sometimes one of disgust, but never one of pity. I want to read Blood and Guts on its own terms, so this is also how I’ll approach this review.
In some ways, Blood and Guts reminded of Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark, which allows dense, seemingly unrelated paragraphs to stack, slowly building into what could never be described as a plot, but certainly a mood or narrative. Acker is similar: for all the plot in Blood and Guts, the reader is much more invested in Janey’s thoughts and conversations than in her sensationalist, violent life. Put another way, the reader is grounded only in Janey’s voice. It almost reads like the world is shifting beneath Janey’s feet, rather than Janey moving through the world. It’s dreamlike.
For example, the incest in Blood and Guts can be read metaphorical: Janey’s relationship with her father more closely resembles that of a couple in their forties struggling with infidelity at the end of a long marriage than that of a 10-year-old and her dad. Incest is treated almost lightly; heartbreak, however, is deep.
…how our mutual fantasy that he adored me and I was just hanging on to him for the money actually concealed the reality that he had stuck to me all these years cause I didn’t ask too much of him, especially emotionally. In this way, fantasy reveals reality: Reality is just the underlying fantasy, a fantasy that reveals need.
Later, long after she leaves her father, Janey writes in her diary, “The first older man I ever fucked rejected me and his rejection put me right back into childhood desperation craziness and made me physically sick.” Could this mean that Janey isn’t a child? That the man at the beginning of the novel wasn’t her father? That this is all a bit Freudian? Maybe, maybe not. There’s something about this line that both denies and simultaneously emphasizes that Janey is a child; we are reminded of her youth by the fleeting hope that she may be an adult.
Because of this quality, writing a review of Blood and Guts in High School clearly makes a lot of contemporary reviewers nervous in the oh fuck, I’m going to get canceled if I don’t say this perfectly way. For example: contemporary reviews of the novel (there are plenty, as it was rereleased by Grove Press in ‘17) go to great lengths to avoid describing Janey and her father’s relationship in any concrete sense. I understand why—as I started writing this, I shied away from saying that Janey and her father “had sex” or “slept together” for obvious reasons. But calling it “rape” or “incest” seems to reject a central idea of the book—that though Janey is a victim of incredible violence, she maintains her autonomy through her choice of language, through her dreams, through desire. For similar reasons, it feels absurd when writing about this novel to use terms like “sex-traffickers” and “child abuse” and “prostitute” when Acker uses words like “slaver” and “fuck” and “whore.” Acker is extremely careful with her words—careful in the sense of a poet, not in the sense of a politician. She is precise but fearless.
In some senses, yes, I think Acker has chosen some of this abrasive, harsh language for “shock value,” but the shock she seeks has a higher purpose than just, like, the thrill of making people clutch their pearls. Janey is an outcast; her nature and existence is shocking and disgusting to those in power. Acker’s language matches that.
In Egypt, her two capitalist jailers debate killing Janey and her fellow inmates. They decide soon, but not yet, after all, the inmates don’t pose much of a threat currently--
Mr Fuckface: You see, we own the language. Language must be used clearly and precisely to reveal our universe.
Mr Blowjob: Those rebels are never clear. What they say doesn’t make sense.
Mr Fuckface: It even goes against all the religions to tamper with the sacred languages.
Mr Blowjob: Without language the only people the rebels can kill are themselves.
This reads to me as a meta reference to how Blood and Guts might be received by an unsympathetic audience. Here, Acker preemptively defends her formal and linguistic experiments before they can be dismissed and misunderstood as a heretical abuse of language (worse than even nonsense!). But it also speaks to Acker’s larger political vision. Janey (and Acker) does not wish to be legible or understood by the capitalists, by the people who hate her. She does not wish to become them or to fit in with them or to even be accepted by them. What she wants is so incompatible from their understanding of the world that they will never think her language “makes sense.” What she wants is freedom; an absolute freedom of desire and expression.
And freedom for Janey is something that looks like an attack on the capitalist world:
Terrorism is not being conscious. Terrorism is letting happen what has to happen, Terrorism is letting rise up all that rises up like a cock or a flower. Tremendous anger and desire. Terrorism is straightforwardness. You are a child. Only you don’t imitate. For these reasons terrorists never grow up.
Terrorism is a way to health. Health is lusting for infinity and dying of all variants. Health is not stasis. It is not repression of lusting or dying. It is no bonds.
And:
[…] In our materialistic society the acquisition of money is the main goal ‘cause money gives the power to make change stop, to make the universe die; so everything in the materialistic society is the opposite of what it really is. Good is bad. Crime is the only possible behavior.
Obviously a lot to say here on the connection she makes between capitalism and sickness, but I’ll leave a longer discussion of that for another day.
Finally, meta-fictionally:
Right now I can speak as directly as I want ‘cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money. Even if one person in Boise, Idaho, gave half-a-shit, the only book Mr. Idaho can get his hands on is a book the publishers, or rather the advertisers (‘cause all businessmen are now advertisers) have decided will net half-a-million in a movie and/or TV rights. A book that can be advertised. Define a culture that way.
All of these quotes, particularly the last, reminded me somewhat of the “feminist reading lists” that have been floating around the internet for the last couple years. Buy these books, put pictures of them on your ‘gram, bring them up over drinks at work, put them on your bookshelf, and voila! You are a feminist. Under capitalism, morality must have a consumptive component—or, to put it more bluntly, what is sellable becomes what is “moral.” Kinda like buying an indulgence in the Middle Ages. The transgressive nature of Acker’s work can be read as an attempt to avoid this trap simply by being too contradictory and extreme to ever comfortably settle into morality that is both legible and permissible by capitalists.
And yet! If we want to head back to Tiqqun (and probably many postmodernist writers), capitalism has an uncanny ability to cannibalize any ideology:
There is nothing, neither poetry nor ethnology, neither Marxism nor metaphysics, that the Young-Girl cannot fit into the closed horizon of her vapid quotidian.
And so, particularly looking at the Blood and Guts quote about Mr. Idaho… I hate to wonder if Chris Kraus’s biography of Acker has been optioned. If any of my friends in the film industry want to really ruin my week… find out for me. I wouldn’t be shocked if we get a girl-boss anti-hero TV-show Acker in the next few years, which is honestly a really sickening and depressing thought.
Though Janey is an outcast, a terrorist, she is not actually disposable by the society that rejects and scorns her. She is often their slave, prisoner, or whore, but still serves a purpose for them even when they no longer want to keep her: after the rebels kick her out of Alexandra, she tells Jean Genet:
I know where we’re traveling, Genet, and I know why we are traveling there. It’s not just to travel, but it’s so those others who kicked me out have a chance of being at peace, have a chance of knowing the land of the monster without going there.
To be at peace is to “know the land of the monster without going there.” I find this line so heartbreaking in its isolation—but also perversely powerful. Capitalism, and its chance of success, is reactionary, built and maintained by the exile of Janey and people like her.
There are lots of moments like this in Blood and Guts, moments in which Acker subverts power in subtle but striking ways. Acker does this in a stylistically similar way below:
Janey to herself: Genet doesn’t know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber. He has to do more. He has to get down on his knees and crawl mentally every minute of the day. If he wants a lover, if he doesn’t want to be alone every single goddamn minute of the day and horny so bad he feels the tip of his clit stuck in a porcupine’s quill, he has to perfectly read his lover’s mind, silently, unobtrusively, like a corpse, and figure out at every changing second what his lover wants. He can’t be a slave. Women aren’t just slaves. They are whatever their men want them to be. They are made, created by men. They are nothing without men.
I have to decide what the world is from my own loneliness.
The first paragraph describes ultimate powerlessness—an ultimate submission, transgressive in today’s culture, to be not only shaped by but createdby someone else—coupled with a statement that contains ridiculous power: that then Janey alone bears the responsibility of choosing what this world is. Janey has the ultimate power; she only submits to the power of others because she wants to.1
Someone who knows more about BDSM might have something to say about this particular power dynamic (the intersections with kink are obvious and intentional)—but I’m not that gal, so I’ll do what I do best and bring up Lana del Rey, who I bet has read Kathy Acker.
Lana has long been criticized by internet-think-piece-feminists for talking about her desire to be submissive—read a collection of some truly insulting (and stupid) things her peers have said about her here, and check out her infamous (and naïve) response to this criticism here.2 I always thought this critique of Lana was a total misinterpretation of her work. Yes, she her lyrics clearly express a desire to be “delicate” and “beautiful” and “submissive or passive [in her] relationships,” which she admits in that IG post—but her desire to surrender control has always had a very clear through line of power. Like Janey, Lana subtly (and not so subtly) asserts her power over these men:
‘Cause I’m a ride or die
Whether you fail or fly
Well, shit, at least you tried
This line from “Blue Jeans” always makes me laugh—through the whole song Lana professes her undying love for her boyfriend, saying she’ll be there forever for him, and then when he tries to do something (presumably big and important), fucks it up, and not only does she sing about him fucking up, but all she can say about it is “well, shit, at least you tried.” It drips with condescension! She never expected him to succeed at all. Similarly, in her break out song “Video Games,” Lana again professes her undying love for her boyfriend, does everything for him, wears his favorite dress and perfume, opens his beers, is hot and fun and feminine… and tells him to “Go play your video game.” She’s dolled up, ultrafeminine, and he’s sitting on the couch playing Fortnite with fifteen-year-olds. She totally emasculates him. It’s slyly, emotionally belittling: “You’re just a man, it’s just what you do.”
And of course, like Janey, Lana is always searching for freedom, above all else. In her songs, Lana begs men to “love me forever”—a desperate plea that both Lana and any listener knows will be denied—and muses, “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” And yet, sometimes in the same song, she is also “wild at heart,” she longs to be free, she looks for the “open road.” She proclaims that she’s “insane” and “crazy” and a “fucking mess.” In Lana’s songs, like in Acker’s Blood and Guts, these two impulses don’t feel incompatible at all, and I think because it expresses exactly the same ambivalence that Acker does: an active desire to give up control to someone else.
Another quote, this time from one of Janey’s poems:
Since we’re both maniacs,
let’s be nice to each other.
I myself want to live.
I want to burn.
all I ask is no one loves me in return.
Though Acker isn’t interested in “being accepted” in the same way Lana is, I think she would admire that Lana is unwilling (maybe unable) to change. I think she would also deeply understand lines like, “Is it safe to be who we are?” and “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have, but I have it.”
Also, so you don’t think Acker’s work is all hard edges, she occasionally leaves you with something as breathtaking as:
It’s possible to have and despise yourself ‘cause you’ve been in prison for so long. It’s possible to get angrier and angrier. It’s possible to have everything that isn’t wild and free. A girl is wild who likes sensual things: doesn’t want to give up things being alive: rolling in black fur on top of skin ice-cold water iron crinkly leaves seeing three brown branches against branches full of leaves against dark green leaves through this misty grey wanders in garbage on the streets up to your knees and unshaven men lying under cocaine piled on top of cocaine colours colours everything happening! one thing after another thing! …you keep on going, there are really no rules: it doesn’t matter to you whether you live or die, but every now and then there’s a kind of territory and you might get stuck; if you get stuck that’s OK too if you really don’t give a shit, but who doesn’t give a shit! Loving everything and rolling in it like it’s all gooky shit goddamnit make a living grow up no you don’t want to do that.
It’s very Gertrude Stein, but also so urgent in a very teenage way. This passage feels very immediate and sharp and alive in the same way I felt at seventeen. The high school of it all.
Oh, there is plenty more I could say (I can’t believe I haven’t talked about the abortion passages), many more quotes I could pull, but I’ve already written too much and taken too long and I’m kinda eager to move on to easier reads... but I also just bought Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, so like, I dunno, maybe you’ll get another round of me (a very milquetoast, office-job, neo-lib, straight-white lady) trying to read and interpret radical, punk, feminist authors from the 70’s by comparing their work to that of contemporary popstars. It’s probably really insulting, but I came to feminism by way of 2011 Tumblr, so like, what else would you expect?
If any of y’all have read Acker, please hit me up! Blood and Guts is one of those books that I know I’d get more out of if I had someone to talk about it with. You can also purchase Blood and Guts here, and you can buy any other book I’ve reviewed here. I will make a small commission, more info on that here.
Anyway, I’ll be back, and sooner this time. Maybe.
xoxo
Book Notes
Okay, one more example that I found particularly moving: after Janey dies near the end of the novel, the last section of prose in the novel concludes with the line, “Soon many other Janeys were born and these Janeys covered the earth.”
Infamous, because there’s been a significant amount of criticism regarding how Lana implies that several women of color (Beyonce, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, etc) have not received the same criticism Lana has, even though they write about similar subject matters. Obviously, this is a pretty blinkered and oblivious view—all of these women have weathered pretty vicious criticism.
Love your analysis, and got a good laugh about your tendency to compare Acker to Lana and 2011’s Tumblr feminism 😂 I actually heard of Acker from being a fan of Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Riot Grrrl era), so if you want to dive into some music directly inspired by Acker and more punk, I’d highly recommend! Acker was something of a mentor to Kathleen during her time in art school.